We need to adopt a no-commute culture
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I've been working 100% remotely for a large company for a year and a half now. They shut down our office (and a bunch of others) to save money on real estate, but with software like Microsoft Teams (and I'm sure there are just as good alternatives, but this has a solid mobile app and Outlook integration, so it's pretty enterprise-friendly), it's not that hard to do.
We also VPN to the same network that we were on when we still had an office, so I still have access to everything we had and can remote into our other servers as needed, just as I could when I was at the office.
Obviously the environment is not a big factor to a lot of these companies, despite the lip service they may pay to it, but perhaps the government could provide incentives to facilitate the transition for several companies?
It really doesn't help that several of the biggest tech companies, which should be a model for how other companies could use tech for this benefit, have gone anti-remote in recent years though. I think that's shown other companies "Well it doesn't work for them, so it can't work for us." and has done a lot of harm as well.
The company that owns my office publicly boast about ecology and saving the planet all the time. Yet every single morning I come in to find the windows open and the heaters on, lights stay on all night, they heat the stairs to 30c degrees even though nobody ever use them, &c.
It's always the same shit, they talk the talk but never walk the walk. Apple doing everything in its power to not let you repair your devices, not even replace consumables, is a prime example of that. 0 companies really give a shit about ecology outside of PR moves.
Anyway, many people value office time to meet actual human beings. Commute isn't that bad if the public infrastructure is decent.
Remote work involves a hell of a lot of flying in my experience... How many car journeys do I have to have saved to pay for one flight to the office every now and again?
The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote. If the rest of your team is colocated somewhere else then you'll have to travel. If your team is spread all over but still relies on face to face meetings (e.g. planning sessions, "all hands" announcements, hackathons) then you'll still have to travel. If your job/role involves dealing with customers who aren't even slightly remote-friendly, you'll have to travel. If you're in or adjacent to academe, you'll have to travel to conferences. Most of these exceptions are not necessary. Unfortunately, most people and companies don't even try to avoid them. They just do what they've done, and the not-really-remote workers have to fly in.
Are you sure about that? I'm curious about your numbers. This is 12 round-trip flights across the US a year, right? And I assume they're always on full flights (peak efficiency)?
From [1] (2013; maybe it's more efficient now), that's 2-3 tons of CO₂ per round-trip—so in your case, let's average and say about 25 tons/year.
The EPA [2] says "A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year."
That means your flying (1 person) is costing 543% as much as driving (1 car)? It's unfortunately not apples-to-apples, so I'm curious what your calculation was.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
The other estimates I've seen put flights as worse than cars, but not that bad.
In the case of gasoline powered cars, I believe they just put out CO2, the other components are pretty negligible. So you can directly compare the warming equivalent of planes to the pure CO2 of cars, it's a reasonable comparison.
It's worth double checking that last thing, it's been a minute since I looked at the numbers, but I'm about 85% sure of it.
"Aircraft engine emissions are roughly composed of about 70 percent CO2, a little less than 30 percent H2O, and less than 1 percent each of NOx, CO, SOx, VOC, particulates, and other trace components including HAPs." [1]
For gasoline the ratio seems to be 51% CO2, 47% H2O, and 0.9% nitrogen oxides, and 1.3% other stuff (excludes nitrogen). [2]
Water vapor isn't considered to be relevant when calculating CO2 equivalents so we can ignore that. [3]
But I'm not sure how much the difference in NOx contribution is... given ground level emissions aren't the same as high-altitude and such.
On the face of it it seems unlikely to me that the non-CO2 components would tip things in the other direction, but I'd definitely welcome better numbers...
[1] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/policy_guidance/env...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas#Spark-ignition_and...
[3] https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalent...
I guess this is better (365% vs. 543%), but still looking much worse than driving?
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Look at the third answer down. The figures I cited earlier were based on about half that mileage per year, so that comes out to 2.3t. Lots of unit confusion here, but I think those both end up being metric tons and the daily commute is already worse than monthly air travel. Maybe that's all wrong, but the point I'm trying to focus on is that the need for regular long-distance travel severely erodes the environmental value of letting people work from home.
2.3t per year, not per month, though.
- Using 261 gal gas/year (which 21.5 gal/month, or e.g. driving 2 × 15 mi/day at 41 mi/gal)
- 1 gal gas = 8.9kg CO₂ (resulting in 2.3 tons of CO₂/year)
In your case that's 15.6 tCO₂/year for flying, vs. 2.3 tCO₂/year for driving.
So, yeah... your flying footprint is 678% more than driving. i.e. you need to fly to work less often than once every 7 months in order for it to beat driving the route you had in mind.
Sorry for the bad news :( but yes, you're very much correct that this makes it even harder for remote work to be good, if you have to fly even twice a year.
Well, he's working a continent away from his office. There are still infinite possibilities for remote work without having to travel 2500 miles for those occasional visits.
I really think we should be working to change this - conferences are huge wastes of resources IMHO. I usually see a handful of inspiring talks, which could just as easily have been delivered as webinars (which would also allow asynchronous viewing, involving a wider potential audience).
Then again, I'm antisocial and terrible at "networking", so those aspects of conferences don't really appeal to me.
And, really, the "hallway track" is the value of going to conferences. For the most part, if someone just goes to a conference to sit in breakout sessions, they're probably better off just watching video of the sessions (if they were filmed) or a webinar version of the content.
Virtual events are fine, as are watching videos. (In fact, for bigger events, I'll often watch the keynotes from my hotel room rather than packing myself into a room with 10,000 of my closest friends so I can watch the distant speaker projected on the screen.)
But it's a small subset of the experience of attending live.
When people make arguments like "taxes should be higher" or "air travel should be more expensive", they almost always mean "for other people".
People need to eat their own cooking or they instantly lose all credibility, even when the facts are on their side.
It could be viewed as an investment in future lower emissions, the same way spending money on R&D today can improve profits in the future.
Even voluntary and cooperative solutions would benefit from the type of coordination an in-person conference affords.
Also, it’s really hard to live in the modern world without using fossil fuel-based comforts. You can criticize air travel and still travel to a climate conference. It doesn’t make climate change any less real. You can maybe argue that people are hypocrites, but so what? The ice caps don’t give a shit. And maybe that meeting of scientists in-person is what it takes to fix a really big global problem. Flying to Asia every year for a vacation definitely won’t do that, though.
Every Hollywood actor demanding we take action on climate change while flying around in a private jet weakens the argument for real action on climate change. It makes the issue look like a vanity cause even though it's not.
You see the same thing on taxes. You've got guys like Bernie Sanders out there demanding we all pay more taxes while he himself has a very low rate of charitable giving by most standards. He could also opt to voluntarily pay more taxes right now. Of course he doesn't, which again undercuts any broader point he may have.
Human beings are hardwired to be turned off by hypocrisy.
I've worked full time remote for over 10 years for different companies and never had to fly that much. I've always flown once or maybe twice a year at most. I think this is more the norm, at least for software engineering and operations.
> The problem IMO is that too little work is truly remote.
You follow this with some specific examples, most of which would require travel even if you were in an office. I don't agree on those you list as requiring face-to-face meetings, they are all fully capable of being done remotely. IMO the only ones that require you on site are one where you physically interact with things/people.
They certainly are, as long as others cooperate. Good for you if you've never been on a team where people resist and sabotage any such effort. I don't see any particular reason to believe your shorter experience is more representative than my longer one.
I had assumed I had the longer experience as most people I've discussed it with have only worked a few years remotely and you didn't specify.
I've only worked one job that was part-time remote where people weren't cooperative with it. But that was mostly the results of one manager who was generally bad, so I didn't take it as remote specific. The other 3 companies where I worked full time remote were all good experiences w/ no one sabotaging things. Solving the issue with one place with the bad manager was pretty simple though... I just found a new job where it wasn't an issue.
Anymore I only apply to places that are either fully remote or advertise themselves as remote friendly with a remote-first culture and it hasn't been an issue.
That seems excessive. I work remote and only have to fly in once or twice a year for a few days at a time, maybe a week.
Do you have an idea of why they don't go all the way and let you WFH on the same basis as I do?
I could go on much longer. ;) The point is that accommodating remote workers requires significant cultural change, and people in mostly-colocated groups resist it. It's much easier for all-remote teams, somewhere in between for teams that are still mostly colocated but have already been "broken in" by someone like me. My last company was much better at this, though worse in other ways. Since there are only about five teams worldwide doing storage at the scale we are, and I want to keep doing that, it's a the "price of admission" and overall I think it's worthwhile. But it's still unnecessary and I'm still sad that it's not improving faster - for myself and others in similar situations.
This, in spades. Thanks for taking the time to explain in more detail.
I don't think that 's true in general though. Is that even remote work? There are now hundreds of companies who only meet for yearly retreats. and these are optional.
I've been working remotely for 5 years and have never once seen the faces of my co-workers. We don't do video chats. We don't do in person visits. We do everything by voice and text.
I wouldn't even consider myself the "most remote of the remote workers." We still do daily standups and quarterly all hands meetings.
Did you do your interview by text chat?
All depends on the type of work, the team setup and the company culture.
By teaching, do you mean workshops/classes? We generally mentor people, but never actually tried teaching. But do most developers in your company teach?
Mentoring people, yes. For very difficult topics that's definitely easier in person. Everyone teaches to some degree yeah. How do you level people up without teaching them?
I never tried to teach, or have been taught, something like a course (even a mini-course) in anything in the workplace. But then again I don't believe most developers are qualified to do that (I don't mean "credentialed").
The other thing I see is a lot of remote workers moving to very sparsely populated areas that are cheap to live in, but where they end up driving 40 minutes for groceries.
There are lots of great benefits to remote work, but environmentalism (in most cases) is not one of them.
It depends on the culture of the workplace. We are able to get plenty done with conference calls and email.
I can't speak for the management and executives above the director, though. They might do a decent amount of travel. But there's about 200 employees that aren't doing any travel at all for work, and only a handful of people in management above them.
And from what I hear, it sounds like a lot of the other departments in the corporation don't do a whole lot of travel either.
Certainly some people I work with, whether developers or other roles, are traveling all the time. But it's not everyone.
I've worked for a virtual company -- no offices anywhere, everyone works at home -- for 12 years. The developers almost NEVER travel.
The owner and I used to be on the road quite a bit (just like most software firms) -- say, through 2010 -- but then it seemed like all our clients and prospects kinda had the penny drop: they didn't NEED US on site to do implementations. GoToMeeting or Skype or WebEx or whatever was entirely sufficient, and saved a shitton of money too.
I haven't visited a client site in over 3 years. I see my boss at 2 conferences a year. HE makes a few more trips -- partner conferences, a few sales trips -- but nothing like what it was in 07-10.
This is something companies could incrementally adopt with existing employees.
My only real gripe is that teleconferencing for meetings just doesn't work that well, because I find it hard to hear people that are not very close to the microphone, and background noise from the open-plan office in which the non-remote team works is very disruptive at times.
Well, and that sometimes remote workers are sort-of-not-quite second-class citizens, probably because we aren't in the office for people to see every day.
I've worked remote 15+ years and that much flying is abnormal in my experience. Some places do quarterly, but I found that rare too. A lot of them do an annual retreat, but it's often optional. Or sometimes we would do a mini-meetup at a developer conference.
It also depends on the position. Most of the flying was for brainstorming sessions in the leadership / project team, but most of the team didn't need to be involved in those.
I will also say I've always interviewed over either phone or google hangouts and I've never had to meet in-person before the offer. I've sometimes gone years without meeting the people I work with in-person.
So it's basically like driving a little less than the flight distance.
If you commute 10km each way every working day, you'll move nearly 3,000km on a year.
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Err... yeah... except I don't drive from the UK to San Francisco.
The relevant comparison is a twenty minute drive a day, vs flying inter-continental a few times a year.
It's called a carbon tax -- if you tax jet fuel, gasoline and coal-based electricity for office a/c equally, the invisible hand of company bean counters and employees will figure out the low-carbon compromise.
I agree that where possible, remote should be allowed/encouraged. I also think that for roles where that can't work, we should consider 4 day work weeks, or other non-commute or less commute strategies. But, to a great extent we are not going to eliminate the in-person nature of working with other people, and we probably shouldn't aim to all live in little bubbles.
Source: I have been full time remote for 7 years. I estimate it saves me ~25k/year in direct and indirect costs + time.
Ask essentially any at least minimally competent expert in economics and they'll tell you it doesn't matter who hands the money to the government (although they might call it the relative elasticity of supply and demand dictating tax incidence). They may all be wrong, but your phrasing gives me the impression you haven't considered this and came up with a good counterargument.
Is that really true?
When my wife started working from home, our utility bills went way up. Still need to heat/cool the place, lights are on, water is being used in the washroom and kitchen.
It's probably far less efficient to have 1,000 employees all using utilities in their own homes than have them all in a handful of buildings.
On top of commute, if you work in an office, you also probably eat out or take delivery - both being arguably much more wasteful than eating at home.
Heating or cooling your home can easily more than offset the emissions associated with driving. E.g. My car might consume 4 kwh round trip (20 miles); that's about an hour of running a typical home air conditioner.
When I work from home I basically wake up, make coffee, and start working around 9am. I can actually get something done before my meeting. I probably put in more work time from home than in the office.
Personally I prefer a balance between both because I enjoy the social aspect of coming into the office. But I'm happy that I have the flexibility to work from home when I want.
Driving to work just frankly sux. I will never do it again.
Trains are cool though.
They're not quite at Tesla levels of autonomy, e.g. most of them don't do lane centering and just bounce between the lanes if left alone (and don't do any lane keeping at low speeds), and they won't automatically accelerate when they bring themselves to a stop, but still, it helps a lot.
I rationalize my commute because it's the only time of the day I can binge-listen to podcasts.
I do think that remote working should be more common, but it's important to think about the things we might lose if it became the norm.
When working remotely, you hit a snag, put a "@here anyone available to help me out with XYZ?" message in Slack, and do some stretches by your computer, wherever that may be. Eventually, someone surfaces from their zone, sees your cry for help, and gets you unstuck. No one need suffer.
Perhaps one day I may become a Twitch celebrity due to my live programming prowess. What say you, chat?
There's only been a few days out of the year that I ever overhear anything where I could be useful or someone would be useful to a conversation I was having with someone else.
Steep price to pay.
Using Zoom and other such platforms (across different companies, computers, meeting rooms) the result is almost always a distorted, low bit, overly compressed sound. Plus crazy 2-5 sec latency in some cases.
One would expect this to be solved in an age we stream 4K movies...
If everyone in a conference room wore individual headsets it would be great. But when you have 3 different mics along the table all of which are picking up different audio signals (to make sure people at both ends can be heard), you need to subtract background noise of construction and hallway chit-chat and people typing on their laptops, and also subtract everything coming out of the speakers (which has different delays in each microphone and is distorted by both the speaker response and microphone response)... and then it's 2:30 and your office upload link is saturated because everyone's starting a new remote meeting uploading HD video simultaneously?
That's why.
But the main culprits behind the "distorted, overly compressed" sound are echo cancellation and then noise cancellation. It's insanely hard. It's actually not low-bit at all, it just winds up sounding like that in the end. (Play with a noise removal filter in Audacity and you'll realize it will produce similar-sounding audio.)
Stay at your desk and join the meeting. Everybody can share a document, look at any document share whenever they like, look straight at the camera with good focus, sound wonderful with a headset mic. Everybody knows who's talking instantly, with their name associated with the voice and face.
The 'conference room' idea is a terrible one, and should quietly die.
At my company we just dropped the cameras. We can still share screen if needed but we didn't gain much of value from seeing faces and the occasional bandwidth issues mostly vanished. I don't think anyone misses the video.
The research I've seen points to a huge, unambiguous, flashing YES.
The fact is that a majority of communication is nonverbal and emotional. And this is just as true in business meetings as it is in your personal relationships.
Video allows us to better understand when someone is done talking and we can speak without interrupting. It allows us to better understand if someone is being intentionally disrespectful or merely clueless. It lets us see if someone is deeply concerned or merely mildly interested. It lets us see if someone is being silent because they're zoning out or because they're furious but resigned.
All these cues (and hundreds more) allow conversations to 1) proceed far more smoothly and efficiently, packing more productivity into a single meeting, and 2) avoid misunderstandings which can be affect both the material outcomes of meetings as well as damage interpersonal relationships.
Many people think video is unimportant, but that's because when it's lacking, we make assumptions about people on the other end for lack of evidence -- assumptions that can turn out to be wildly untrue. Because we have no immediate evidence to the contrary, we assume we're not missing anything. This is why research is so important -- it shows that plenty of normal human communication tasks often perform far better with video, and more frequently fail without it.
This is one of the few arguments against remote work I actually agree with: streaming video technology still isn't good enough to replace in person haptic communication.
I think video should be opt-in, but unfortunately I'm forced to turn on the camera at work.
I've had call conferences with people I've never seen, and it really hasn't been a problem.
I barely think about what people look like now at my job, even the people I used to work with every day in person (when we still had an office); they're mostly just distinctive voices to me now.
No: if you want to be part of a meeting, everybody should be going to conference rooms or phone booths.
It's a pretty good rule though it's probably harder to convince people to follow it if it's a single person who is somewhere else.
I'm not sure of the state of the art in 3d positioned sound in a data format, but you could do that pretty easily.
I thought of a startup back in 2016 for selling auto-transcripting, voice-signature tracking, meeting logging microphone arrays for businesses. Never had the capital to do it.
That's how it's done already. Beamforming mics have been around for a few years. They're definitely better, but still far from perfect. Because signal processing just isn't perfect. Incredibly smart engineers are doing their best on this stuff.
You need under 20ms latency to be truly imperceptible, and probably under 150ms to avoid scenarios where people are often talking over each other. I wonder what their routes look like to make this possible?
A transcontinental link might just be fast enough for 150ms, but stack on that all the buffering, codec delay, etc. and it's night impossible to have imperceptible delay.
This is a group that has worked together for a long time, 30 years for some of us. I'm guessing there is an element of knowing each other's speech patterns from talking face-to-face that will help with knowing when to contribute.
If a 10K "hello" voice sample (that takes 2 secs to be spoken) needs to pass through a 1Kbps bandwidth line, then it would have lotsa latency.
In any case, we stream 4K movies with not much buffering (as evident by the ease of skipping ahead at random points). One would expect better audio latency based on that.
And we also stream 4K video games as video streams (or Google claims so).
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fw...
A lot of pro-audio companies also make boardroom devices but there are huge compromises because of the form factor—usually companies want their audio to be as invisible as possible.
That and acoustic treatments. So many "teleconference" rooms are half glass. That's going to add extra noise. Hell for a 20-person meeting you might do a lot better with a few SM57's slung from the ceiling or standing on the desk and a few baffles.
Pitching that would probably be disappointing, though.
Imho economic incentive is best incentive. If employers saved money by not paying you to sit in a car 10 hours a week, it should make a compelling argument to try minimize commutes.
It's a shame society can't bill them for the emissions & congestion & noise & other harms too.
People just trade their time for money, preferring to live farther away from work
In Europe, tracking hours is common and in many cases mandatory. Unfortunately you can't clock in the moment you step out of your door for your regular commute. So it's not counting towards your contractual hours or overtime compensation.
If you actually track the hours and include commute, the incentive should change for the employer to minimize your commute time (because it costs them money). Of course there's a risk that they'd try to weasel out of it by a corresponding reduction in your base salary, so some additional checks would be needed for this scheme to work.
I don't think people really want to trade time for money as much as they do when it comes to long commutes. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would choose shorter commute any time if given the choice, but right now the onus is on them to leave their nice home and find a more expensive (and probably tight) apartment in congested downtown if they want a shorter commute. It's all on them, and not on the employer to find a way to reduce commute.
I'm also in the lucky position that I can work from home if I choose and in a particularly lucky position that I live on a boat and so am able to move to different towns or cities (in the UK) and work from there, which I've been doing over the course of the year. Currently my boat is moored right outside my office so have a 0 minute commute.
We have a daily standup where I get to talk to my colleagues, we have a monthly get-togther where we work together from a rented office and have a social time in the evening.
It's not for everyone but for me I can't imagine working in a different way.
I did the shared coworking space a lot. People are nice, but it's hard to have calls discussing PII with folks from different companies, even different industries, around. Plus I can't really build any shared commonality with them in a work sense.
I like biking to work, and meet my colleagues and have some kind of social contact during the 8 hours. If anything, one could optimize for remote teams, not everyone has to be in the same building. And not all companies have to have their office in the same street down town.
This is a bit paradoxical, if not downright stupid.
Best resource I've found so far: https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-...
So if a bay area company is willing to pay $180,000 but someone would be happy to do it from Minnesota for $70,000, maybe they are paying $70,000 for the work and $110,000 for the chance to smell the employee in person every day.
what do you think? Could that drive the point home?
Companies here believe strongly that being together in person is very important and so is prestige. Nothing is going to change that anytime soon.
"Moderate. I think he'd rock the boat a little with the local team"
IT/Dev is the only white collar professional field where you can make this joke, too. I can't imagine lawyers rocking up to court in a baggy Aerosmith t-shirt and reeking of grease and pepperoni.
Of course, the source is the IrishTimes and Ireland has pathetic provision for cycling (aside from the odd greenway which is great for recreation but not transport).
Dublin seems hellbent on being 20 years behind other cities.
In Ireland, there's far less commuting than in the US simply due to the size of the country, and the Irish economy has a different mix of sectors than the US, so the types of jobs are different.
You can tell from the fact that the author targets commuting as a greenhouse gas source that he's talking about commuting by other means than walking. 44% of Ireland's population lives in a single city, so "going to work" may well consist of walking or public transportation.
He makes a number of points which probably only apply to the situation in Ireland, and which would be impossible in the US (despite the enthusiasm on HN) because of the size of the country, the types of employment available, and the fact that the mix of people in the US is simply socially different from Irelend.
Offsetting greenhouse gas use in Ireland by working from home or a shared workspace may well be a workable proposition in Dublin, but it's a complete impossibility in the US, for very many reasons.
I wish it was otherwise, but the US and its economy are built around use of vehicles... it's a big country.
Ireland and the US are both quite auto-dependent. Commute times are similar
44% is only true if looking at the broadest possible definition of Dublin, and most of those places are not well-served by transit, bike infra, etc.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/average-commute-u-s-states-...
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...
Most people do it by car, too, though not quite as many as the US (63%) https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp6ci/p6c...
The US is indeed low density, but this is generally _because_ it's built around vehicles, not because the country is big. The older cities were built before cars and exhibit pretty high densities.
The density of the country as a whole doesn't really matter, anyway. After all, it's not like someone said "we just added Alaska as a state, let's start downzoning Los Angeles for lower density".
"Offsetting greenhouse gas use in Ireland by working from home or a shared workspace may well be a workable proposition in Dublin, but it's a complete impossibility in the US"
This is surprising considering how many of my colleagues work remotely from the US.
For the last 12 years, I've worked for another 100% virtual company. I have 3 co-workers I've never even SEEN in person. I see my boss -- the company owner and the person i work most with -- in person only about 2 times a year, at the two big industry conferences we do.
My wife works for a conventional company in downtown Houston. We live close to downtown, so it makes the most sense for her to take the bus. It's just as fast, and much lower hassle, than driving. Her employer pays for her pass.
As a consequence, we have only one car. This is nearly unheard of for upper-middle-class Americans outside of a few very concentrated urban areas (ie, more than Houston -- think NYC, Washington DC, Chicago) with more substantial and pervasive mass transit.
And this car only gets about 7K miles a year of usage, which is a little over half what is considered "normal." Over 1000 miles of that in any year is trips to visit my family; there's no other way to get there easily or economically.
Yes there are edge cases - roles that require physically manipulating stuff that isn't accessible remotely - but a vast number of roles could certainly be moved remote.
The usual arguments against remote work would either be discovered to be not actual problems (such as the fear that remote workers won't actually do their work) or business/workflow systems would be implemented to resolve the new problems.
Business is traditionally very slow to adapt to changes. That's why big laggard companies get little done and make few innovations, but they buy startups that took risks and did new things. (Now unfortunately, they often absorb those innovative young companies and crush the soul out of it, leaving just another drone department.)
Why should someone want to climb the hierarchy? Well, we are not all satisfied with being paid disproportionately less in exchange for the meager luxury of being largely left alone in the quiet amusement of being a coder, only to be shoved out of a job when you hit 40. Earning a living does matter in life, whether we like it or not.
In the broader context of society, what this person is asking for is the dissolution of the City and a return to rural society. That is not ever going to happen, baring a catastrophic global failure of human civilization. Even then, if any humans remain they would quickly form into villages instead of "remoting" to the village.
* Full-time remote, monthly trip to NYC, 5544 rail miles: 0.06 - 0.42 metric tons of CO2, depending on whether you classify the Acela as a "long distance" train or a "local/commuter" train
* Drive to the train station, take the commuter rail five days a week: 3k miles of driving and 12k miles of rail travel for the year: 2.39 metric tons of CO2
* Drive 60 miles round trip five days a week: 7.83 metric tons of CO2
Obviously for labs and hands on experience you will still want to go physically to your university, however I envision a future where all you need to do to go to class each day is pop on a pair of VR glasses and you are in a hall with all the other students listening to the professors lectures.
Granted there are self learning / online courses already to mitigate commuting to learn, however I believe the next step in education should be a VR college.
Working internationally and flying in 4 times a year is probably worse than living locally and driving in 5 days a week. Assuming you fly 16,000 miles or would drive 12,0000. Living locally and working from home a few days a week is probably the best compromise.
I love it. Conferencing software makes meetings normal and I think I have access to everything someone on a campus would. (Well, ok. I miss water-cooler discussions and whiteboard explanations. But otherwise, it's all good!)
It's been great. I wish more jobs offered remote work.
Choose a small city in a low-cost state, and you can have this too.
I'm glad that remote work is an option today and I can choose to live where I want.
One day, hopefully, it'll be out of town and I have my own quiet little garden, with apple trees.
Partners working is not always a profitable endeavor. People often forget to include housing costs in the calculation. If you are forced to live in a large city, your costs go up.
Obviously in many large cities people live in small apartments . It wouldn't be crazy to assume someone would work out of a Cafe, Co-working space, or Library.
So you can still do a small commute with a bike or etc.
Likewise, they're often loud and hard to focus in when doing detailed, focused work.
1) shameless plug: we are making a community for remote workers @ https://reworkin.com
They can tighten them remotely via RDP ;)
Offline, unplanned conversations often yield incredible insights. I have the option to work from home on Friday’s, but find being present with others gives me a far better understanding of what’s happening in our office.
Remote work works in a lot of contexts. And in many it doesn’t.